14 DAY TRIAL // No one can be perfect all the time, right? Well, neither can Google, which is apparently not really sure about whether or not four of the US presidents were members of the KKK.
Search Engine Land has spotted one "oops" situation in the featured snippet, which is the area just below the search box where Google displays the answer to your question. More specifically, four presidents were named to have connections to the Ku Klux Klan.
Of course, there is no conclusive evidence that any of them were Klan members, but Google lists them all four - William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, and Harry S. Truman.
It's all in the code
Commonly, this featured snippet box is only used when Google is absolutely sure the answer is correct. Of course, the company doesn't handpick them, and there's a special code running in the background. Perhaps it has something to do with the number of views the website the information comes from has, because we've never actually heard of it before to give it any kind of credibility.
The site Google uses as source took the content from another site and so on, so it's pretty much impossible to figure out just who came up with this idea.
Wikipedia, whose articles are always under scrutiny and reviewed by editors, says there is absolutely no evidence to connect presidents Warren G. Harding and Harry S. Truman to the extremist group, while the situation of the other two isn't discussed in detail.
This isn't the first time Google goes through an embarrassing moment due to this featured snippet box, and it quite likely won't be the last. In the past, the search engine dubbed Barack Obama as the King of the United States, while on another occasion when people wondered what happened to the dinosaurs, they were pointed toward a religious website; and we all know where that goes.